"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

FixRep is an 18-month project, led by UKOLN at the University of Bath.

This project aims to examine existing techniques and implementations for automated formal metadata extraction, within the framework of existing toolsets and services provided by the JISC Information Environment and elsewhere.

Metadata records include formal metadata, such as title, author and resource creation date, temporal and geographical metadata, file format, extension and compatibility information, image captions and so forth, as well as subject metadata. Formal metadata (by comparison to subject metadata, which usually draws on information extrinsic to the document itself) is mostly intrinsic to the document - information that can be taken from the document and its citation. Some formal metadata is collected by almost all repositories.

In a recent JISC-funded report on the topic of metadata consistency (Charlesworth et. al. 2008) the authors recommended a number of means for improving metadata quality, such as making available human-readable guidelines for users and exploring the user of automated metadata extraction to support the deposit process. The quality and nature of a contributed metadata record is dependent on the method of generation and the amount of domain knowledge available; creation of a complete metadata record can require information from the target repository and/or dialogue with other data sources, such as name authorities, Sherpa/Romeo licence information and/or existing citation databases. The result is that one comes to look at metadata record creation as an initial stage in a complete life-cycle that includes revision, normalisation and versioning. The revision stage in the life-cycle is where we intend to concentrate our effort within this project.

Partners

• NaCTeM, Knowledge Integration

Useful links

Google Code site for FixRep: http://code.google.com/p/fixrep/

Contacts

Project manager: Emma Tonkin

Project outputs

See the Dissemination section for documents, publications and presentations given during the course of this project.